Where, you asked, are the great creative energies?  Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as energies. I think, through channels nearer this material plane:  nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.—­No:  there is no question where the sheer brain force has been:  it has been in the West.  But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats?  In Pope most emphatically.  But off with your head if you say he gave the greater gift.—­Or I will leave Pope, and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he devised his philosophy:  there was a much longer evolution behind the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the other’s titanic brain-effort.  Yet, so far as the putting forth of brain energies is concerned, there is no question:  Bacon was much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West incomparably greater in brain energy.  And I am not making such a foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the two races.  You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the Han, the T’ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean, Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze.  In the West, the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more forcefully with the human intellect:  had a much more vigorous basis in that, I think, to work in and upon.  It has reached lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully—­ and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd.  On the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.  Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by religious emotion;—­they don’t readily gush over a personal god.  It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality:  have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on planes less material, nearer their spiritual source.  It will seem so the more because until very recently China has been constantly misrepresented to us.  And yet I think it is pretty much the truth.

In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind.  It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure vistas of Itself.  Compare Michelangelo’s Moses with the Dai Butsu at Kamakura:—­as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures.  The former is a thing of titanic, even majestic energies; but